(a) Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for blocking incident rays to the inside of a vehicle configured to block or weaken incident rays by measuring a driver's hand operation to block rays and incident points of the rays when rays are incident to the inside of the vehicle.
(b) Background Art
Generally, when a significant amount of direct sunlight enters a windshield or driver's seat side glass of a vehicle, a driver can become temporarily blinded or sun struck due to the large amount of sunlight hitting his or her eyes.
Further, a similar problem may occur when beams of headlights of a vehicle are being driven within an opposite lane of traffic if approaching the vehicle. This has particularly become a problem in recent years as vehicle manufactures have begun adopting headlamps with a high degree of luminance.
One common solution is a sun visor. A sun visor is a mechanical device which is configured to block sunlight or light in general which is incident in the driver's seat and a passenger's seat inside the vehicle. Sun visors, however, require the driver to take his or her hands off the wheel and manually raise or lower the sun visor while the driver is driving the vehicle to block the light entering the vehicle and thus is often thought to be inconvenient. Additionally, sun visors also block the driver's visibility as well as the light and thus reduce the visible area through which the driver can see through the windshield or the side glass.
One solution for the manual operation problems of the conventional sun visor is a sun visor that automatically adjusts itself to block rays according to the intensity of rays and a type of rays as shown in FIG. 1. This technology requires a driving motor 8, a ray sensing means 20 mounted on windshield glass 6 or a rear surface of a review minor to sense light rays, a motor controlling unit 30 controlling the motor 8 to rotate forward/backward according to a sensing signal by the ray sensing means 20, and a sun visor 10 mounted in/on panel 2 of a vehicle body to slide vertically on a guide rail (not shown) by the forward/backward rotation of the motor 8.
However, since the automatic sun visor shown in FIG. 1 uses only the ray sensing means attached to the windshield glass or the rear surface of the room mirror, the height of the sun visor is uniformly controlled according to the quantity of incident rays which are incident in a front area of a driver.
Therefore, the quantity of incident rays measured by the ray sensing means may be different from a reference amount of incident rays required to drive the sun visor under a predetermined driving condition (for example, on an uphill road or a downhill road), thereby orientating the sun visor in a direction which is not actually blocking the light rays in this instance.
Matters described as the background art are just to improve the background of the present invention, but it should not be understood that the matters correspond to the related art which has been already known to those skilled in the art.